Internet network traffic exhibits large transient spikes in traffic loads independent of the number of individual data flows that have been aggregated together into a larger single flow. Such behavior is said to be “bursty” and fractal, as the pattern of demand remains self-similar at all scales of aggregation. Packet switching networks are capable of carrying bursty traffic efficiently since they can switch network bandwidth dynamically on a packet-by-packet basis, and therefore are able to provision the needed bandwidth to handle a burst of traffic, typically within a few nanoseconds or less. Circuit switched networks, on the other hand, are not bandwidth efficient in carrying bursty traffic since they can only make relatively long lived (typically on the scale of a millisecond or longer) bandwidth allocations and so cannot switch bandwidth quickly in response to a traffic burst. Burst switched networks (wherein a burst is the concatenation of one or more packets of variable length), like packet switched networks, can be bandwidth efficient in carrying bursty traffic as they too are capable of switching bandwidth within a small timescale. In order to realize this bandwidth efficiency for bursty traffic, conventional packet switching and burst switching networks require the use of fast switches to switch traffic at network nodes.